|| "How to Find" Hints || Laws of each Nation || || Political sites on the Net (sorted by country)

"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program" - Milton Friedman

[To read the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference presentation (in Indianapolis, Indiana June 8, 1998) on "Fundamentals of Treaty Research", click here.
and here is a Guide To European Legal Databases]

The first thing to do is to be aware of some research guides available on the Internet:

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/~llou/mpoctalk.html (General Legal Research)
http://www.lcp.com/The-Legal-List/TLL-home.html (Legal List/Research/Net)
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/glin/us.html (Library of Congress Guide to U.S. Law)
http://www.virtualchase.com/legalresearcher/ (Internet/Legal Researcher)
http://www.legalethics.com/pa/ (Practicing Attorney's Home Page)
http://www.llrx.com/sources.html (Finding Law-Related Resources)
http://www.internetlawyer.com/start.htm (Annotated Legal Research Links)
http://www.uwe.ac.uk/facults/ess/htm/docs/lawres.htm (UK annotated guide)

These guides will give you a good head start and links to resources, especially when it comes to finding the primary sources of U.S. law. And for background information about the sources of U.S. law, you can also check out Mark Eckenwiler's Legal Research FAQ at http://www.faqs.org/faqs/law/research/ or Nolo Press' guide at http://www.nolo.com/ChunkLR/LR.index.html

Secondly, you can search major law-related web sites such as FindLaw at http://www.findlaw.com/, FedLaw at http://www.legal.gsa.gov/, Cornell at http://www.law.cornell.edu/, American Law Sources Online at http://www.lawsource.com/also/, Internet Legal Resource Guide at http://www.ilrg.com/, Washburn at http://lawlib.wuacc.edu/, and Indiana's World Wide Web Virtual Library for Law at http://www.law.indiana.edu/law/v-lib/lawindex.html for needed resources. Or try general search indexes and catalogs such as Altavista at http://www.altavista.digital.com/ or Yahoo at http://www.yahoo.com/

Thirdly, if you are looking for references to journal articles, you can try CARL UnCover's free 17,000-journal table of contents search service at http://uncweb.carl.org/ For bibliographic information about books, you can try online library catalogs such as the U.S. Library of Congress at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catalog/, Georgetown University Law Library at http://www.ll.georgetown.edu:80/lib/gulliver.html, Harvard University at telnet://hollis.harvard.edu/ and Hytelnet's USA WebCats (web-based library catalogs) at http://library.usask.ca/hywebcat/states/USA.html Or try online bookstores such as Law Stuff USA at http://www.laworder.com/, Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/, etc. Or searching publishers' web sites directly at http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/LibInfo/Law/directory.html#publish

Finally, if the above searches fail, you can try asking for help on the U.S.-based LAW-LIB list on listproc@ucdavis.edu (for law librarians - has over 2500 subscribers, mostly U.S. law librarians), on the NET-LAWYERS list on listserv@peach.ease.lsfot.com (for lawyers and others with questions about legal resources on the Internet - also U.S. based, with over 2,000 subscribers, mostly from the U.S.), or on the, also U.S.-based, LAWSRC-L list on listserv@listserv.cornell.edu (for exchange of information about legal resources on the Internet). Or consider fee-based document delivery (for photocopies of publications) or U.S. legal research services.

Go to the Self Help Legal Clinic Liberty's Educational Advocacy Forum Indiana's Fully Informed Jury Association, Inc.